Did you ever hear the warning, “be careful what you wish for, it might come true?” Well, because Microsoft is the company most people love to hate, I decided to ask a cross section of industry cognoscenti this simple question: What would happen if Microsoft and all of its technology disappeared tomorrow?

The thing I find most precious these days – are the Open Office Suite – it has now grown to a fully scaled and very efficient Office Suite – which provides me with a tremendous value – and recently – I found a company who offered excellent and valuable documentation / training material for all user (my self inclusive) – and I would encourage you all to take a look.

Once you have seen the quality, pick up the credit card – the prices of these books are simply one of best ever seen.

Mozilla, maker of the open-source Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client, says a reliance on proprietary technologies is still an obstacle for IT directors looking to deploy open source in the enterprise.

Say what you will about Windows’ lack of openness or its seemingly never-ending software flaws.

If you double-click on an installer and the version of Windows you’re using is reasonably up-to-date, your software will install. This is also true on Mac OS X, where installing software often involves nothing more than dragging a single icon from the install disk to your applications folder.

I’ve mentioned Ubuntu in this column before. Stable, streamlined, and thoughtful, it may be my favorite Linux distribution overall. It has improved with each new release, which appear at regular intervals — about every six months. But the new version, 6.06 LTS, code-named Dapper Drake, is different.

For starters, it’s the first release that’s available in a server version. More significantly, based on the maturity of the Linux kernel, Ubuntu’s new installer, and other components that make up the distribution, for the first time Shuttleworth has declared this release ready for enterprise use.